The Nuts and Bolts: Why You Should Understand the Technology Behind Your Website.

The website, over the past several years, has evolved. The web started out as a way for tech-savvy people and businesses to monotonously display their information. Now, the web is an expression of the caricatures of the human race. The moments of greatness – and the occasional moment of darkness – are displayed in full high-resolution for everyone to experience. Centuries ago, only the rich and powerful could print words. Now, the power of the press is available to anyone and everyone. A website is a beautiful representation of a person’s soul and passion. Why, then, would a person not strive to understand the inner workings of their own soul?

OK, maybe that’s a bit on the melodramatic side, but I do know this: learning the inner workings of a website empowers people. It’s an amazing feeling to be able to fix a problem on your blog – especially since you don’t have to to call your web developer friend when something looks out of place. Being able to make (or fix) something with your hands – even if that something is made of bits and bytes – is a great feeling.

The biggest deterrent, I’ve seen, is that people just don’t know what they don’t know. They’ve stumbled haphazardly onto their WordPress theme editor and panicked at the sight of lines and lines of code. To best understand what’s going on in our website, we must first know what we need to know. When people ask me what they should learn, there are three things without fail that I recommend they study.

HTML

HTML tags are the fundamental building blocks of the internet. No matter what language you write in, the resulting output is usually HTML. HTML stands for “Hypertext Markup Language”, and serves the purpose of taking raw content and applying basic structure and form. HTML won’t tell you how wide or what color something is, but it does provide the backbone for being able to set those attributes. Paragraphs (<p>) are separated from headlines (<h1>) and lists (<ul> or <ol>), and documents go from a mass jumble of words to a neatly formatted set of instructions for the browser to follow.

CSS

HTML tags only display information. It’s the CSS (Cascading Stylesheets) that takes that information and applies true form and style. You can make those paragraphs grey, change the headlines’ font, and ensure your lists have a colored background. You can even take whole sections of content and position them exactly where you want to on a page. Most browsers already have styles built into them, but we can over-ride those styles by changing their rules in a stylesheet document – a top-down approach that “cascades” the style rules down a specific order of operation.

PHP (WordPress)

Now that we’ve determined the structure and color, we can start talking about the content. Running a site that’s pure HTML is a daunting task. Fortunately, content management systems like WordPress have made it easy to “templatize” a site – you supply the style and function rules, and the machine spits out your content depending on where you are. Going to a single page pulls only that content from a database, and a category only shows posts that are specifically marked to show.

PHP uses defined functions – meaning that you can write rules that can then be called again and again as needed. A WordPress site, at it’s most basic form, only changes the ID number to figure out which content to grab – everything else is just a template.Yes, this is a gross simplification of a larger process, but once you learn the basics it’s amazing what you realize you can do. I encourage anyone who owns or operates a website to at least pick up a few of the basics. Your website is an extension of you – it’s your place on the web to make art, write, and even sell your wares. And I’d dare say that having a website is no longer optional – not even for your regular people.

I do workshops weekly for people to learn the inner-workings of WordPress and other design-related topics (and I’ll be doing a Design & Tech Workshop in TBEX Athens to teach people some of the very things I talked about above). I’ve seen people’s lives changed because the act of learning, even if it’s just a small fix here or there, has empowered them to make the most out of their website. Learn the basics, take control of your website, and make the world a better place. Who could ask for more?

Author Bio: Mitch Canter is a WordPress Designer / Developer from Nashville, TN. He strives to make the web a more beautiful place, and to empower his clients better understand WordPress and how to use it. You can see his work at http://www.studionashvegas.com, and find helpful WordPress resources athttp://www.understandwp.com.